Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Switzerland is counting the wrong foreigners.
[00:00:08] June 15, 2026 I'm Diana Earley. With the pressures of privilege.
[00:00:14] Growing up with Swiss grandparents in Gstaad, I've seen the creep, the way things disappeared. Today, Swiss voters rejected an initiative to keep the country's permanent resident population below 10 million until 2050.
[00:00:28] Switzerland spent months counting the foreigners who might come. The count is still missing some of the foreigners already here.
[00:00:36] After spending time in Lausanne, my son came up to Kstad. A local man asked him, how's it going with the immigrants down there? My son looked around.
[00:00:45] I don't know, he said. How's it going with yours?
[00:00:49] In Friedrich, during Muttsplay, the visit, the townspeople loudly reject an offer to kill a man for money.
[00:00:55] Such a bargain would violate their bourgeois values, their belief in justice, their decency and the value of human life.
[00:01:02] They never openly change their minds. Instead, new yellow shoes begin appearing. People smoke better cigarettes and buy expensive goods on credit. The church acquires a new bell. A crane appears in the distance.
[00:01:17] The play is set in the fictional town of Gulen, a name derived from Gule slurry or liquid manure.
[00:01:25] Gstaad is not Gulen, but there are some similarities. My grandparents watched the town change as increasingly extravagant wealth moved in. When my grandfather read about the proposed bypass tunnel project in the mid-1990s, he shook his head and said, himmel tudzig tnewetter. After their deaths in 2004, the changes accelerated.
[00:01:48] They would have been horrified by the cranes now.
[00:01:51] First went the small businesses. There was the Mati butcher shop where my mother parked my pram and where later I was given a slice of bologna.
[00:02:00] There was the von Siebenthal bakery, owned by my American godmother's husband. There was a dining room at the Olden where local men played yass and drank after work.
[00:02:10] In our family papers, I still have the receipts. Marlboro's cigarettes and beer.
[00:02:16] At those tables, two worlds met. My father taught Elizabeth Taylor to ski. I have a photograph of them dancing in a conga line.
[00:02:24] Then the butcher closed. In 2004, the bakery became hush.
[00:02:28] A nightclub opened by Roger Moore's son, Jeffrey. Bernie Ecclestone bought the Olden. The story told locally is that he closed the side entrance used by farmers because he did not want the smell from the stalls.
[00:02:44] Tacky. Theodora Coppolis, hardly an egalitarian, nevertheless understood the bargain. These pigs that come here now Europe has given in to money, he said. Once we let it in, there's no going back.
[00:03:00] Kshad now attracts fortunes on an entirely different scale.
[00:03:05] Russian billionaire Dmitry rybolovlev reportedly bought two chalets for $130 million each, connected by an underground pool complex, and was said to have flown in David Guetta to perform on New Year's Eve.
[00:03:19] The Mimran family built part of its fortune through the Compagnie Sucriere Senegalese. In 1995, the company prosecuted the Senegalese media group Sud Communication after it published information about alleged customs fraud. The group was fined approximately 763,000 pounds, according to UNESCO. The court did not determine whether the reporting was true. It focused instead on how the journalist obtained the document and who had leaked it. The Memerand family later invested in the Alpinextad, part of a luxury development that cost hundreds of millions.
[00:03:54] A roughly 100 million franc sports and culture complex in the shape of a gigantic pyramid. It would hold a 1,200seat concert hall designed by Herzog and de Meuron, paid for by public money, foundation money and private donations, plus a proposed 10 million Swiss franc fund to cover operating deficits for the first decade.
[00:04:19] All for a festival that managed to bring the world to gstade for 70 years without a permanent haul.
[00:04:25] In 2015, Tacky wrote in the American Conservative that change began earlier the the rot began when Elizabeth Taylor bought a chalet and the paparazzi followed her discovered the place.
[00:04:38] Meanwhile, Stadt Guy has turned the village's name into global shorthand for performative wealth. What began as a parody of the ultra rich became a marketing platform for the luxury brands it mocked. The joke became an advertisement. Elizabeth Taylor could ski with my father and dance with locals because no one was reporting her today. The famous retreat into chalets with underground entrances, swimming pools and private party rooms. That freedom is gone for them too.
[00:05:09] The Swiss people Party voter isn't wrong. Switzerland's population has grown rapidly. People experience that growth through crowded trains and highways, scarce low income housing, full hospitals and pressures on municipal services. The Swiss Federal Statistical Office confirms that foreign nationals account for a disproportionate number of recorded crimes and prison inmates relative to their share of the general population.
[00:05:35] Serious violence and homicide. Crime is up. I understand the anger. Most important is the cultural anxiety. The feeling that the Switzerland people grew up with is disappearing.
[00:05:45] But who changed Gstaab? Was it the Polish worker on the train or the Romanian nurse in the hospital?
[00:05:53] Or was it the man who could buy the hotel, close the farmer's entrance and disappear behind an underground door?
[00:05:59] The connection between migration and oligarchic wealth is not one to one. Not every migrant was displaced by a billionaire, and it would be false to claim otherwise. Some of the fortunes welcomed into Switzerland were accumulated in countries where journalists could be punished for investigating the companies behind them. The person at the border must explain where he came from and why he's here. The money rarely has to explain itself.
[00:06:24] My grandpa father would shake his head and say, himmel tu sich tonnewetter.
[00:06:29] The loss of Swiss culture does not begin when a foreign worker arrives. It begins when the butcher disappears and pyramids are built. There is a difference between participation and possession. Ecclestone did not merely enter the Olden. He bought it. And the farmer's door opened, closed behind him.
[00:06:51] If this episode landed for you, share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you haven't already, subscribe so you don't miss what's coming. But here's the real thing. I want you to know if you're carrying something you can't talk about, if you have every resource except someone who actually understands what wealth costs. I work one on one with people like you navigating exactly that. You can reach me@diana oehrli.com. thanks for listening.
